Contenu du sommaire : Topor, artiste multimédia

Anything and Everything: Topor and the Cultural Industries
Roland Topor never wished to be confined to the profession of illustrator alone, and one of things that certainly characterized his work was the way in which he appropriated the cultural industries of his time, whether it be cinema or television, in symbolically illegitimate genres (cartoons, but not really for children, television, but not quite for adults). This great diversity led him to implement highly distinctive strategies. We will identify three. The first concerns the multiple re-use of his drawings, in journals that themselves are structurally very diverse, while the second concerns the audience and the intentional disorder in which The Wild Planet throws down a critique of its time, even though the notion of an animated film not being intended for children left viewers disconcerted. The third, finally, disturbs the place of the author, such is the extent to which the various collaborations in which Roland Topor engaged seem to go against the grain of an agreed representation of a unique artist exercising control over his work. These are just some examples of “disorientation” in his work and they show the extent to which the use of cultural industries can prove fertile in an artistic approach that always sought to free itself of stereotypes.

Roland Topor and the Hara-Kiri Gang
Though Roland Topor worked with Hara-Kiri for only five years, between 1961 and 1966, it was for this newspaper that he produced the most drawings. It was there that he forged his style and began to gain a certain notoriety. Anxious to chart his own course and refusing to limit his work to the press illustration, he left Hara-Kiri but continued to frequent the same cultural networks as several of the monthly magazine's cartoonists, notably Wolinski and Willem. He found himself reunited with the “Hara-Kiri gang” in publishing (at Pauvert or Losfeld), the press (L'Enragé, Le Fou parle, Charlie mensuel) and even television (Merci Bernard, Palace). A singular figure on the Hara-Kiri scene, Topor was both one of the most brilliant among them and a peripheral, marginal presence—the only one, perhaps, who refused to be taken under Cavanna's wing.

Drawing for Television: Topor the a Guest on Tac au Tac (1971–1972)In 1971–1972 Roland Topor was a guest three times on Jean Frapat's TV show Tac au Tac, which had been broadcast on French television since 1969. Inspired by Surrealism's exquisite corpse, this show would bring together press illustrators and cartoonists on the same set at the ORTF's Service de la Recherche, pitting them against dialogic picture games under the watchful eye of the cameras. This article analyses the playful constraints invented by Frapat and the production conditions on his programme viewed against his aim of producing a televised encyclopaedia of contemporary drawing. The study also investigates Topor's participation in this programme and evaluates the place of his own artistic universe in this experimental form.

Portrait of the Artist as a Television Chat: Topor and Téléchat (1977–1986)Téléchat was a five-minute programme whose 234 episodes were first broadcast over three seasons, on Antenne 2, between 1983 and 1986. Dreamed up by Henri Xhonneux and Roland Topor, the programme adopted the format of the newscast, but with two puppets for presenters: Grouchat, a cat with its left paw in plaster, and Lola, an ostrich with a plunging décolleté. By studying the first thirty episodes of the series, that is to say nearly two months of programming, we aimed to reveal the multiple facets of a show that is both well known and rarely analysed. After reviewing the logics underpinning the production, dissemination and reception of Téléchat, we sought to bring to light not only its discourses on television, but also its ironic, playful and poetic representations of the social world.

Topor and Kubin: Shared Symbolism?
This article seeks to show the parallels and differences between the symbolist universes of Alfred Kubin and Roland Topor. Although most of the research is devoted to Kubin, this is because Topor—who knew of the former's work from 1962—made no attempt to conceal his admiration for the Austrian artist. Topor's ties with Kubin revolve around a shared inheritance of dark, crazed Mitteleuropa imagery, but also a practice of writing referencing L'Autre côté. However, it is probably iconography that offers the most important common ground, for here the French artist takes up the quintessentially symbolist themes of his Austrian elder—especially those invoking woman and death. Yet where Kubin's images constitute an imaginary world into which the viewer slips, in Topor, derision and the critical gaze require a degree of distantiation.

Topor's work is characterized by a multiplicity of media, formats and techniques. With drawing and writing, a pencil and paper, he shows the extent of the possibilities offered by these tools of creation. Topor lays claim to the “multiple” as the subversion of the “unique”. Meaning, significations and the function of beings and objects must not, in his opinion, be reduced to the mere diktats of consumer society. The work of art is a product of communication. On this ground, all games and all individual complexities are apt to open up creation, the field of discoveries of new forms and meanings. Topor put this dynamic to work in works, that is to say, in forms, books and various acts. The “multiple” dimension to Topor's work was one of the reasons that made him move closer to certain artistic avant-gardes of his time, and, more specifically, the Nouveaux Réalistes and Fluxus.

A “bobo” in the City. Analysis of the Plural Existence of a Category at the Interface of Journalism, Business and PoliticsFor the past fifteen years, the term “bobo” or “bourgeois-bohème” is extremely prevalent in Parisian life and many different types of people use it regularly. This intensive use leads even to a saturation in the discourses, making the classification hard to escape. How was this category first created? How does it circulate between journalistic, commercial, and political spheres and even in everyday life? To what extent does it act as a social representation? In other words, what are the issues at stake in this classification? Thanks to an analysis of many speeches about and around this figure and generated by it since its creation in 2000, this paper argues that the category is at the crossroads of social and symbolic competitions unfolding in the French and Parisian society, and that it operates as a contemporary mythology.